Cavewomen Don't Get Fat

Shirley J.               Adult Non-Fiction                    Low Carbohydrates/High Protein Diet Info.

Cavewomen Don't Get Fat: The Paleo Chic Diet for Rapid Results by Esther Blum   304 pages

I have heard a lot about the Paleo diet and this book explains it from the get-go and more importantly goes over all of the benefits women can gleen from it.    While I was delighted to find it is basically the low carb/high protein diet that I am extremely familiar with Esther Blum also goes into several herbal and vitamin additions that aid in detoxifying the female body, balancing estrogen, progesterone and testosterone, yeah, ladies, we have a little of that, too, and how you can feel better, look better and do your body better healthwise by eating a diet heavy in protein like our cavelady ancestors ate and giving a nod to that hunter gatherer lifestyle gals back then had, she tells you how foraging the produce aisles at the grocery store/health food store can prove amazing on getting us lean in a short time with miniimal effort on our parts.   She recommends exercise but not nedesssarily hard core hit the gym 6 hours a day 7 days a week stuff.  no, do some form of exercise 20 to 30 minutes 3x a week while staying away from the processed food stuffs and revisiting our love of meat or other forms of protein, eating good for you fats and treating yourself to sweets of the fruit variety or natural think a bit of honey, after the first week will please that sweet tooth.  Taking a walk counts as big-time exercise so don't worry about   anything strenuous unless you want to go that route.   It is a good book with lots of good information in it and for a change recipes that not only taste good but aremade from stuff normal people buy not celebrity chefs.    I recommend this book to anyone yung r old who would like to drop pounds and learn how to love and live the life that will keep them off.

The Omnivore’s Dilemma

The Omnivore’s Dilemma 

by Michael Pollan           Audiobook:15 hrs., 53 mins      Hardback Book:  464 pages               Genre:  Adult Non-Fiction     Nutrition   Fresh vs. Processed Food   Vegan vs. Meat Eater

Ethical treatment of the animals we turn into food         What the American diet is doing to our health

What a great book!   Michael Pollan explores the history of food that which is grown and that which is processed.    How corn and wheat find their way into everything processed (food) or manufactured (products) in one of its many forms even into gasoline.    His core premise is:  “Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize  as food.”    Soy is the third sister in the corn, wheat. Soy triad.  These 3 ingredients are what are helping to make Americans’ waist bands increase, they are the evil that causes so many diseases in the American population costing billions in health care when if we would only go back to a more natural diet we could avoid many of the health care woes in America today (Heart Disease, Carroded Artery blockage, Diabetes, etc.).   Pollan says these diseases could all be eradicated if the American public would only avoid processed foods with hidden starch/sugar and salt preservatives and eat only things that were once living things and not unidentifiable bits of sludge coated in pleasing to the tastebuds sweet or salty flavorings.   He even cites how pet kibble comes out as a brown tasteless sludge before it is adulterated with colorings and fake flavors simulating lamb, fish, beef or poultry that give little change to the flavor of the sludge and along with the carefully produced marketing of brands and labels and jingles that are catchy and stick in our mind translating to dollars for the companies producing them.    He talks about the horrible conditions of animals raised for food on the big industrial farms and how and why the corporate farms will not change their tactics its all about the money not the living (if you can call it that) breathing (in the ammonia of their urine and feces as they stand in their own filth through no fault of their own and are force fed diets their bodies were never meant to eat of corn, sometimes soy mixed in along with ground up dead animals from rendering plants in effect forcing these animals to become cannibals of their own species instead of being allowed time in the sun on grassland eating their natural foodstuffs and their physical make-ups aren’t fashioned to process the corn, rendered animal flesh and blood.    This is where Mad Cow disease came from as beef animals force fed the concoctions strictly meant to put weight on them as they are forced to stand until they drop, cows kept perpetually pregnant to continue producing milk their calves either turned into veal or kept for their dairy production potential or slaughtered outright, Pigs having it no better, piglets getting their tails cut off with nothing to kill the pain and nothing to stop infection from the poor conditions they are maintained in.   The chickens kept alive for 7 weeks fed the same cannibalistic load of corn, blood flesh mix along with steroids to produce extra large breasts that grow so fast the birds no longer retain the ability to stand.     Americans ingest not only the animals brought up in these conditions but are also taking in the food that these animals are forced fed.   It’s a wonder we don’t die faster from multitudinous causes given this toxic mix put on our plates everyday.    Plants sprayed with pesticides we know not what.    Americans die from more food related maladies than any other country.   Statistics are proving that now the more fast food restaurants and the Western Diet is introduced into other cultures the more these countries are showing an increase weight and an increase in death statistics from the same top 5 diseases that are killing Americans.   Michael Pollan decided to follow the food chain from beginning to end on both vegan and meat eating.    He learns how to hunt both mushrooms with experts so as not to get poisoned and he learned how to hunt wild boar from a couple of chefs and one of their friends.    He learned the proper preparation for wild mushrooms and how to kill, skin, clean and carve up the wild boar and cook it.     He details his adventures along the way in lurid detail so not for the faint of heart.   The reader has to read the book from an objective perspective and not from a compassionate one as many inhumane things happen to animals here.    Excellently told, extremely informative.   I would highly recommend this book to anyone who really wants to know the story behind the story.   Well done.   Cheers for Michael Pollan.  

 - Shirley J.

The Bad Food Bible

The Bad Food Bible: How and Why to Eat Sinfully by Aaron Carroll, MD.     Audio Book:  7hrs. 11 mins    Hardback Book:  272 pages              

Really good book, I am so glad to have gleaned the knowledge that Dr. Carroll imparts here.   First of all, I fell madly in love with him when he admitted the dirty little secret of doctors is when diagnosing patients they give their best guess.     I realized this some years ago, but, to actually hear a doctor say it – he had me in the palm of his hand for the rest of the book.    And it is a good book.    He talks about the different types of studies and surveys that people tend to believe and why they shouldn’t      If a finding is based on animal testing he says like the saccharin studies that say saccharin causes cancer in lab rats, don’t give up coffee, msg, or any number of other foods, because in the labs they dose the animals with multiple mega doses of whatever it is the study is based on and besides the study tells you it is done on rats not people.    He says never believe any study done on animals.   Also, don’t believe short terms studies on small groups of people.    Only pay attention  to studies done on huge groups of humans that are blind, random procedures, ie. somebody gets the real thing, somebody else gets a placebo throughout the thousands of people with differing lifestyles, different cultures, different ages, different eating habits, those who are obese and those who are not, those who have type 1 Diabetes and those who do not have Diabetes in other words, really random like real life is and the study must go on over a long period to be of value.    If 7 people are studied for 1 week that is basically useless information.   The trial hasn’t gone on long enough to really make any type of evaluation other than speculation rather than causation.    In one of his classes at Indiana State University he asked his students to go online and find studies on 40 different foods that promote their beneficial and/or healing qualities, then he asked them to go back online and look for studies showing how each of these same 40 foods cause cancer.    Each of the 40 foods were said to make you live longer then each food was shown in other studies to cause cancer in various parts of the body.    A wise person told me once, you can’t get funding to study the same thing someone else did, you have to take the opposite approach if you want backing.   Hence why the assignment Dr. Carroll assigned his students proved that out.    He dispels the rat tests, the coronary analysis, and multitudinous other studies that are familiar from the media promotions over the years berating a thing one day then praising it for its benefits the next.   He says there is nothing wrong with enjoying a nice steak (red meat) or fish said to contain mercury that will poison you – it won’t.   Dr. Carroll says a person would have to consume so much each day for msg, aspartame, caffeine, alcohol, glutten, you name the offending ingredient, to do the outrageous claims made that it would be humanly impossible to do so.  He says salt is not bad for you, unless, your blood pressure happens to be outrageously high, then you might want to cut down, but, none of the foods we are told are bad for us can really hurt us unless like the poor beasts injected with mega doses we gorge ourselves to extinction which is not going to happen.    No one is going to overindulge every day for the rest of their life on any suspect ingredient.    He recommends savoring the food and beverages we enjoy until we come across a double-blind study of every human being following  the course of their eating habits for a couple of decades – that would be believable.   And he discusses the pros and cons of organic food and food grown wherever by whoever using pesticides, weed killers and more on their crops, and free-range verses factory farms/ slaughterhouses.      There is no real difference proven statistically that shows one is bad and one is good for you, nothing proving one is better for you than the other.   Natural honey is not better for you than sugar substitutes.    He is really entertaining and interesting in how he explains the ins and outs of the food trade, food myths and how the public has been force fed bad information so long that we come to believe it even though it is absolutely not true.   Dr. Carroll promotes enjoying Chinese food, eating a muffin loaded with glutten smothered in real butter, chased down by a diet soda or Scotch.     It turns out nothing is bad for you in moderation which is how most of us eat anyhow.   Dr. Carroll promotes enjoying life and savouring food and stop worrying about the latest food findings (information can be manipulated any way you want it to and statistics can be made to reflect whatever the person compiling them wants them to whether they are honestly true or not.    The one thing he says is true is that smoking is bad for you and yes, it does cause cancer.    So put the cigarettes down and treat yourself instead to your favorite meal guilt-free.